Category Archives: History

For Yoshi, who never came back

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Posted by in American History, Arroyo Grande, California history, History, Uncategorized, World War II

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This photograph was taken on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on the day Executive Order 9066 was executed and these friends were separated.

There’s a good chance they never saw each other again.

When the buses came to take our Arroyo Grande, California, neighbors away on April 30, 1942, many of them—less than half—came back. I grew up here, and I don’t recognize many of the surnames in the old high school yearbooks.


One woman told me this: On the day the buses came to the high school parking lot, her mother saw a line of high-school girls, some Japanese, some not, walking up Crown Hill, walking up toward their high school, holding hands and sobbing.

Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans went first to the Tulare County Fairgrounds, where they slept in livestock stalls, and then to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature was at or above 109 degrees for twenty of their first thirty days there.

I interviewed a remarkable woman named Jean a few weeks ago. She is 94, is briskly intelligent, articulate and gracious. Her father owned the meat market on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 census, and when his Japanese-American customers, farmers, came in to settle up before the buses came, he refused to take their money. “You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”

When they came home three years later, he extended them easy credit until they could begin to bring in crops again. Jean showed me her father’s business ledgers, so I have no reason to doubt it when she told me that every one of those farmers paid her father back. In full.

This is Jean as a high-school freshman. The doll, with her handmade kimono, came to Jean from Gila River in gratitude for her family’s friendship. For their loyalty.

At ninety-four, that loyalty runs in Jean as deeply as it ever has. One of her best high-school friends was named Yoshi. I can find a photo of the two together in second grade. I found a photo, too, of two second-grade boys in the Arroyo Grande Grammar School in 1926. They would die, about twelve minutes apart, on USS Arizona.

Yoshi’s brother became a war hero. He won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant when he went behind Japanese lines in China to rescue a downed American flier.

Yoshi’s brother brought that flier in and made him safe. Jean never saw Yoshi again and, because of April 30, 1942, there is a part of her that can never feel safe.

The war, at its outset for America, killed two of our sailors. It would claim many more local young men, killing them in Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal and on the beach at Tarawa. It would kill a young paratrooper in Holland during Operation Market Garden. It would kill, with a sniper’s bullet, a tank-destoyer crewman on the German frontier three days before his first child, a son, was born.

The war killed neither Jean nor Yoshi. They remain its casualties, nonetheless.

We had to stop the interview for a moment. In remembering her friend, Jean was fighting hard to stop the tears. One escaped. That moment taught me so much history, and with such intensity, that I almost couldn’t bear it.

Classmates, Shipmates

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I was browsing an early 1980s version of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the South County Historical Society journal, and I found this photograph of the Arroyo Grande Grammar School second grade in 1926-27.

The two boys who are circled are Wayne Morgan (top) and, in the front row, Jack Scruggs. Wayne’s father, Elmer, was a partner-owner of the Ford agency, today’s Doc Burnstein’s Ice Cream Parlor. Jack’s father had lost his farm earlier in the 1920s; at the time the class photo was taken, he worked with an oil prospecting company exploring the Huasna Valley.

That’s Wayne in the front, in a photo taken during this Ford Model A’s nationwide tour in 1931 (the car, fully restored, is owned by a Michigan car collector).

Nine years later, Wayne would join the Navy.

By the time Wayne Morgan graduated from eighth grade, Jack Scruggs’s family had moved to Long Beach. Both boys were musicians–Wayne played violin in Mr. Chapek’s orchestra (he was also an avid Boy Scout), but Jack would make music his career.

In 1940, Jack joined the Navy.

 

Jack is circled in this photo taken on November 22, 1941, during a Battle of the Bands competition among the ships of the Pacific Fleet. Jack was a trombonist in Navy Band 22–the band of USS Arizona.

So there’s a very good chance that the one-time classmates had a reunion on the great ship.

The tragic part of the story, of course, is that both were killed on Arizona. The concussion from a near-miss killed Jack just before 8 a.m. as the band was preparing to play the National Anthem during the colors ceremony. Wayne died about ten minutes later, when the ship blew up. So were all of Jack’s bandmates, killed at their action stations in the Number Two gun turret, just inboard from where the fatal bomb struck.

A few weeks before the attack, Jack had played “Happy Birthday” on the accordion for Rear Adm. Isaac Kidd’s wife–Kidd flew his flag on Arizona. All that was found of him after the attack was his Annapolis class ring, fused to a bulkhead.

 


Jack’s body was recovered; he came home to Long Beach. Wayne rests with his shipmates.

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I knew both were from Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in 1940. I thought it extraordinary that two young men from such a small town wound up serving on the same ship. I had no idea that they were in the same grammar school class. 

Sometimes even the smallest footnotes in history tell compelling stories.

 

Not exactly “Nanny Dogs,” but…

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in History, Uncategorized

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Bear with me on this one. In AP European History, one phenomenon we studied was the mid-Victorian custom in middle-class homes of photographing dead children. What we got around to learning was that this macabre (to us) practice was actually a by-product of the Agricultural Revolution. Largely because of improved diet, more and more children were surviving to adulthood. In the 18th century and on the American frontier, both Mrs. J.S. Bach and Mrs. William G. Dana lost half of the twenty or more children they gave birth to.

Because of improved diet and improved health, by the mid 1800s children were surviving, even thriving. This meant that parental bonds between parent and child were growing stronger: you could afford to invest your love in something as precious as a child because you weren’t going to lose her. In fact, this is when the forerunners of the Dr. Spock books appeared and were almost guaranteed to be best-sellers.

So the photography of little boys and girls who had died was visible evidence of something very poignant: By the 1850s, parents loved their children so much that they didn’t want to let them go.

Which brings me to pit bulls.

While they weren’t exactly “Nanny Dogs”—it’s never wise to leave a child alone with any dog for too long—pits were the single most popular family dog in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Since parental bonds were by then far closer and more enduring, my guess is that you wouldn’t leave your child alone–or photograph her, for that matter–with a dog that’s considered vicious. I did read a study that claimed that, after Goldens, pits were the most patient breed who would endure the most pokes from children. And we did have a pit cross, Honey, who was one of the sweetest dogs we’ve ever owned. But she’s anecdotal.

Still, it again makes me wonder if the problem is less with dogs and more with humans. There are strains of the pit that have been bred to fight; the “toughening” of dogs like these, and the former quarterback Michael Vick is an example, involves inflicting pain on them. I’ve known people innocently walking their dogs who were attacked by a pit, and it’s a singularly terrifying experience. They are trying to kill your dog. Or you. Or both.

It’s not only terrifying, it’s disheartening. Some pits may have a killer instinct, but it’s a trait that’s been bred into a dog, or trained into a dog, by a human who has no heart. (Or, in the recent case involving a Belgian Malinois attacking and killing a local man, a wonderful man, a dog owned by a human who has no brain.)

It’s not my intent to argue for or against the breed here.

What I am trying to say is simply this: These photographs are fascinating.

But they may demonstrate that the traditional views we hold of dogs—or of other human beings—need to be subject to examination and reflection. I’m afraid that we are much more comfortable with tradition. It’s almost as if our prejudices have been bred, or trained, into us.

The Work that Teachers Do

10 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in History, Personal memoirs, Teaching

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I re-read the manuscript of my little book, World War II Arroyo Grande, this morning, found it brilliant, and then remembered, because of a degenerative neck disk, that I was loopy on Norco, and “The Berenstain Bears Dig a Septic Tank” on Norco would have exactly the same impact on me as the first time I read From Here to Eternity or Cold Mountain.

Here’s the Magic part.

There are three books, out or about to be released, written by former students of mine. I take no credit for anything they write–except for their history essays–but I am every bit as happy for these books as I am for mine, and now that I know how hard the work in writing a book truly is I don’t even have the words for how proud I am of three young writers: Alex Bittner, Maeva Considine, and Evan Devereaux.

No work is more demanding and more lonely than the craft of writing. With one exception, and that is teaching.

What we do every day in the classroom isn’t work–for me, it was the greatest joy to teach young people like these in my years at Mission Prep and then in Lucia Mar. Nowhere was I more authentically myself than in a classroom, in the time I shared with teenagers.

For most of us, the “work” begins at three o’clock and ends in the dark. The weekends are just two more workdays: we write our weekly plans at our kids’ Babe Ruth games and we grade our essays at Cafe Andreini–seething a little at the guy at the next table burrowed deep inside the Sunday “Times” or the fiftysomethings in bicycle tights about to head up the Huasna. It’s galling to see leisure flaunted so shamelessly while we work in such anonymity.

It takes a toll. My serum cholesterol levels dropped 61 points in the five months after I retired.

We work hard, but the toll is exacted most in the extra work we are required by distant decision-makers to do–mandated in a fantasy world where we actually have the time to do it–and what we do for them is eventually written up in a barbaric language, Educationese. It’s work that almost always has no meaning and does almost nothing to make us better teachers, when wanting to be a better teacher is a constant hunger every good teacher feels. A good teacher would never force her students to do this kind of work because she respects children.

And the work we amass really is meaningless, because within three years it’s all thrown away. A new model rolls into Education–NCLB, OBE, Integrated Teams, The Common Core–so a new paradigm shift sweeps us away and we start a new round of what is most accurately called “busywork.” We feel a little like Rose Parade princesses, with fixed smiles that make even a princess’s jaw ache and endless Rose Princess waves that will eventually numb her arm. We’re like prisoners on a pedagogical Rose Float whose petals will turn brown as quickly as the last one’s did.

And we are told, every time, that we should not fear change. This is insanity, of course, not “change,” what we do to teachers. It’s the kind of busywork that crushes the second-greatest gift a classroom teacher has: her idealism.

Her greatest gift, of course, is the roomful of children entrusted to her, the complex and precious aggregate of human beings she has to face every Monday morning.

I hated Monday first period. I am an introvert and I was terrified every first period of every Monday for thirty years. My hands trembled every Monday for thirty years. But we force ourselves to begin because we worked so hard, when we were alone and anonymous, on our lesson plan. Plans. Mine usually went through two and sometimes three revisions.

Sometimes they don’t work at all and you have to learn to throw the plan out in the middle of a class and fly by wire.

A lot of good teaching is like that: it’s not meant to be weighed, measured and stored in the Skinner boxes the distant decision-makers build for teachers. A lot of good teaching is instinctual, improvisational, and attuned to what the students need in the moments where they depend on your leadership and on your humanity.

By the way, thank God, the anxiety of starting a class dissipates and in a few minutes: we are so absorbed in teaching the plan well and clearly that we really have just the faintest connection to it. Even in the lessons that go well, we teach instinctively, because now we are in a deep, living and constantly evolving relationship with our students.

We aren’t dispensing information. We’re inspiring, infuriating, affirming, correcting, evoking, and confronting.

There is nothing in my life–only the births of my sons come immediately to mind– that has made me happier than my time with children, and the captivity of all the unseen we work we do to prepare is transformed, as if it were alchemy, into the kind of freedom only a teacher understands.

What other career gives you something that approaches the sensation Orville Wright might have felt that day at Kitty Hawk?

And then young adults like these three remind us that what we do is important and powerful. It makes an old teacher like me very quiet inside. My little Wright flyer is safely on the beach again, and the miracle of what we’ve done together is overwhelming.

Huasna Road spirituality

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in American History, California history, Family history, History, Personal memoirs, Teaching

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Mom and Roberta, 1943

 
 
I think about my Mom a lot in January, the month when she was born, and in March, the month when she died. She never said any of the things below, but I decided to try to say them for her as authentically as I could. What lessons did I learn from her when I was a little boy?  I decided on ten. I’ll never get the wording exactly right, and I’ll never be able to articulate all the lessons, because so many of them were nonverbal and taught by example. Ours was not a peaceful home, nor was it always a happy one, but there were times when my mother’s parenting was, as I think about it more than fifty years later, actually quite inspired.

 

 
 

Ten Lessons

  1. Each of our lives is tuned differently, so each of us produces a different tone. It’s the melodies that please God most.
  2. Books, and music, and ideas, and politics, and God, and talk. That makes this place, five thousand miles away from Ireland, an Irish house.
  3. You young people might be all right after all. Ringo makes me think so. He looks just like a Basset hound!
  4. Faith is stronger when it’s tempered by doubt. The men they tried at Nuremberg were True Believers.
  5. Those people working the pepper field over our pasture fence don’t look like us, and they don’t speak our language. How lucky we are to have them so close.
  6. You’re the one that burns a little hotter than the others. I need to be patient because I love you.
  7. We owe the poor our love and respect; we owe the rich prayers for good eyesight. It’s so hard to see a carpenter’s son planing His father’s wood from the great heights that they inhabit.
  8. There is no forgiving intentional cruelty.
  9. I will raise singular daughters and honorable sons.
  10.  Life inflicts terrible wounds and unbearable pain. Just hang on. If the pain continues, just hang on. A time may come when you need to let go of it. Say goodbye with love.

Dad and the German Major

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in American History, Arroyo Grande, Family history, History, World War II

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I’ll be sending two copies of the book World War II Arroyo Grande to young active-duty soldiers. This makes me a happy new/old writer: one reason I wrote the book, I think, was to reintroduce the World War II generation to my generation and to my students, and I’ve always had a soft spot for students who’ve gone into the service. I’m also very happy that I’ll be sending a copy to Judith, a favorite student who achieved the highest grade ever in my U.S. History classes. Judith is from Germany. She loved learning American history.

The photo is of my father when he was a young man on active duty in 1944. I’ve told Judith this story, but once the war had ended in the spring of 1945, Europe went hungry–the Continent’s infrastructure had been obliterated by ground combat and by the Allied air campaign. The footage of German kids eating out of garbage cans in 1945, in the long months before the Marshall Plan, always stunned my students. In the meantime, thousands of POW’s in our care died of hunger or of opportunistic diseases because civilians got first priority for food, and there never was enough.

A Wehrmacht major, who outranked my father, then a U.S. Army captain on occupation duty, somehow latched onto him and for a few weeks became his personal bodyservant: the German officer cooked for him, cleaned his quarters, washed and pressed his uniforms, the works.

He did that because Dad was a Quartermaster officer and so had access to food. (A year before, my father repaid an English family’s kindness to him with a bag of oranges. The mother’s British reserve crumbled. She wept. Her family hadn’t seen oranges in five years.) The young German officer wanted to live: his pride meant nothing when compared to the wife and children he wanted in his arms again once he was cashiered. My father was his ticket home.

In summer, he would begin the long walk home along roads choked with refugees and gaunt, tired soldiers. Dad never learned what happened to him but hoped, in talking about him years later, that the German major had lived a long and happy life. What started as a relationship of expedience had begun to edge into a friendship. Perhaps, very faintly in the recesses of my imagination, there was the unspoken thought that my student Judith was the major’s great-granddaughter. I owed it to this soldier to be the best teacher I could be for her.

The tough American soldiers of Easy Company–-the “Band of Brothers”–-liked the English, for the most part, loved the Dutch, but, like my father, felt most at home with Germans.

It does make you wish that British Pvt. William Tandey had shot Hitler in 1918, when he had the man in his sights at Marcoing. We could have done without Clemenceau as well, I guess, in his 1918-19 incarnation, but a younger Clemenceau had done great good for France and for the revolutionary ideals of tolerance and of the equality that citizenship confers.

These are ideals that Hitler despised because, of course, they included Jews, like Alfred Dreyfus. Clemenceau had been one of Dreyfus’s most adamant defenders. Dreyfus was a good French soldier, but the older Clemenceau dominated the drafting of a foolish, vindictive peace treaty dictated, in his mind, by a generation of good French soldiers whose bones littered the nation’s soil. Even today, farmers in northern France, in turning over fields there, find the bones of boys their harrow blades.

A generation after that war, there were more good soldiers, good young men on both sides who in a better world should never have been enemies. But they didn’t live in a better world; theirs had been penetrated by evil.

Americans had fought a war in the face of great evil once before. There was a lull in a Civil War campaign that gave a Union army band, its vast audience in bivouac, time enough for a concert. Confederates on a nearby hillside were listening. One of them called “Yank! Play one of ours!” So the band played “Dixie,” and at the song’s conclusion, both sides erupted, thousands cheering, tossing their caps in the air. They embraced a vivid moment when they were at peace together, before the close-quarters murder so characteristic of that war—and, sadly, so necessary for its resolution—resumed.

Similarly, once their war was over, a German soldier reached across the divide to make a necessary peace with my father. I hope my book will allow two young soldiers today to reach across the divide that time imposes to meet other young soldiers, including some who died such a long time ago. In a small way, it gives them life again.

Walt Whitman may have articulated this idea best in what I think is one of his finest poems, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Time and distance avail not, Whitman wrote. They are irrelevant. Indeed, when you read the poem you have the uncanny sense that Whitman is reading with you, just over your shoulder, or that you’re leaning on the ferry’s rail, together with the old man, the harbor’s breeze in his whiskers.

In the same way, we are all of us on the road together in the journeys of our lives. I think that sometimes, without recognizing them, we walk alongside our ancestors, and among them is the German major who yearns for home.

Gisela’s murder

03 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in American History, History, News

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Gisela Mota

 

Gisela Mota became the mayor of Tenmixco, Mexico–in Morelos, the state of a hero of mine, Emiliano Zapata–on Friday. She’s seen here at her swearing in. Yesterday, Saturday, drug cartel gunmen shot her to death outside her home.

I hate drugs because they are so much more insidious than bullets. So it’s jarring when a little research reveals that recent marijuana legalization may have been the most effective tactic yet used against the Mexican cartels. They are losing a significant part of the immense flow of dollars that sustains them. They are hurting.

So was a recovering heroin addict I knew once. But he was having a far, far easier time than the guy trying to kick his—legal—prescription painkillers. That man was going to pieces. Both  were sick men; I’m not sure why they’re alive, but not this vital young woman. None of this makes sense to me.

Two more things, in our relationship with Mexico, don’t make sense to me, either:

  • In the wake of NAFTA, American corn producers dumped their product on the world market a decade ago. They generated a wave of foreclosures on small Mexican farms and the resultant migration, now subsiding, that Mr. Trump wants to end with a wall.
  • If you know our history of alcohol abuse, from the very beginning of the nation (it was, ironically, corn alcohol at the beginning), then you know that we are not noted for our impulse control. So it’s not supply, but instead American demand for drugs that helps to fuel the cartel crossfire that kills so many innocent Mexicans.

“Poor Mexico,” the poet Octavio Paz once wrote. “So far from God, so close to the United States!”  Few nations are so tightly linked yet so insistent on denying their kinship. The first victim of the Mexican Revolution was an El Paso housewife hanging out her laundry, killed by a bullet that crossed the border. More than a century later, the cartel murders represent the worst violence since the Revolution, which killed a million people, or one of every ten Mexicans.

Somehow, the drug violence must stop. I don’t know how to stop it. But I know that this not what Zapata died for when he, too, was assassinated in 1919. I know, looking at Gisela’s image, that the Mexican people have been cheated again, robbed of a young woman of promise in the young part of a year that now promises nothing at all.

 

A Tudor woman? No thank you.

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in History, Teaching

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Mark Rylance, as Thomas Cromwell; Claire Foy as Anne.

 

It took Anne Boleyn to help me to understand why I cringe when Donald Trump asserts that he “cherishes” women. Henry VIII cherished Anne, and that diminishment is what made killing her so much easier for him.

I thought about Anne recently while watching PBS’s Wolf Hall, based on the wonderful Hilary Mantel novels, whose protagonist is Henry’s minister, Thomas Cromwell.

One of my favorite lines–Cromwell’s, and typically, it stings–involves Anne’s alleged lack of cleavage. There’s an exchange between him and Jane Boleyn, when Cromwell asks Jane, who has little love for her brittle sister, if Anne and Henry’s love has been consummated.

Not yet, Jane tells him. But Anne allows Henry to kiss her breasts.

A pause. Just a slight one.

“Good man if he can find them,” Cromwell replies, and exits.

 

* * *

 

Henry wrote about them in his love letters. He refers to Anne’s breasts as “pritty Duckys” in 1533, three years before he has her executed.

There was, by the way, bad weather in the Channel that day. Anne had prepared herself to die, only to be told the superb French executioner, her husband’s parting gift, was delayed. She had to do it all over again the next day, when he arrived and she departed.

She did so with immense courage.

Her grave is beneath the altar of St. Peter ad Vincula—I’ve taken students there–within the Tower of London, only a short walk for her ladies-in-waiting, who brought her coffin down from the scaffold, once they’d carefully wrapped Anne’s head and body in damask and reunited them inside. In reality, it wasn’t a coffin. It was a chest for storing bow staves, originally bound for Ireland to kill humbler subjects there.

It’s hard to hate Anne, with her being there the way she is. It’s such a tiny grave. So was her neck, she remarked with a laugh before the execution. Her alleged lovers, including her brother, were buried at the other end of the little chapel, and their bones now are intermingled there, as if they finally were co-conspirators, after all. But the Boleyn family was evidently a piece of work: arrogant, ambitious, tone-deaf–-much like the Greys, who beat Lady Jane all through her growing up–-they boxed her ears, punched her, flailed at her legs with a birch rod, and then they got her beheaded, still a child, in the name of their own ambition.

I would not have chosen a life as a noblewoman, I remember telling my students. The lives lived by the wives of peasants or tradesmen, I think, were in many ways more substantive: the executions, disinheritances, serial affairs, and the emotional and physical abuse so prevalent in Henry’s circle set noblewomen apart from most English women, who could count on the smallness of their rural villages for protection.

One example. No pregnant girl was left bereft. There are virtually no illegitimate births in rural England in the sixteenth century. There are plenty of marriages recorded in parish registers that produce issue in the christening books four months later. [Anne herself was heavy with Elizabeth when she finally married Henry in a midnight ceremony.] Young men, anonymous to us, were held accountable for their actions; we can’t even hold a famous man, Trump, accountable for his words.

No woman’s life was easy. But the lives of women like the Boleyn sisters or Jane Grey had such cruel edges. Their personal power was cleaved as decisively as if they’d all gone to the block.

Meanwhile, Henry’s love letters are in the Vatican Library, which seems a waste. So does his life: all the statecraft, the parsimony and the ruthlessness of his father, Henry Tudor, was wasted by Henry VIII, a soft, self-indulgent man, in the single-minded pursuit of a son of his own.

Neither Trump nor Henry, so often true of soft, self-indulgent men, show evidence of a sense of humor, so the irony would have eluded them: within Henry’s court, in her little petticoats, there was Anne’s red-haired toddler daughter, who would become twice the king her father ever hoped to be. Donald, just as oblivious as Henry was to an obviously gifted daughter, has opined, creepily, that he would date his if their lives had been different.

There’s a scene in one segment of Wolf Hall where Henry holds Elizabeth in his arms. He is enchanted, but only momentarily. Mistress Seymour catches his eye, so Henry abruptly hands the little girl off to her governess. Damian Lewis, who plays Henry, is such a good actor that you can see the king forgets his daughter in the instant he loses physical contact with her. Meanwhile, Jane might burst into flames, so intense is his focus.

I think that’s why Cromwell is so appealing in Wolf Hall. Henry’s self-absorption, like Trump’s, is suffocating, so Cromwell’s competence, which is so unlike Trump, is like a candle that won’t go out. Not yet.

Jane Seymour finally gave Henry the son he wanted, only to die after the little boy’s birth. She was another female sacrificed for her king. Henry was heartbroken. Of his six wives, Jane was the one he cherished most.

Of course, little Elizabeth would grow up to decide that she would never marry. There’s no mystery in that at all. She’d grown up in a world dominated by vain and powerful men like her father. There was nothing they had that she wanted.

 

DuffontheroadtoTilbury

Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth, Tom Hardy as Leicester, as she approaches Tilbury to speak to her troops, assembled for the Armada invasion. Duff’s delivery of the speech is, I think, pitch-perfect.

Keeping Up Appearances

23 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in History, News, trump

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In trying to come to grips with Donald Trump, I’ve been lost. I don’t have that many frames of reference–Huey Long certainly comes to mind; some say George Wallace, both men fire-throwing Populists who took on the political establishment. He has some of the tone-deafness, too, of Charles Lindbergh in his America First days. They’re all close, but I think now that Trump belongs to a different species, and its origins are European, not American.

Trump’s political, if not biological, family has its origins in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Victoria’s family. There you’ll find his twin brother from a different mother, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. The two seem to share some significant personality traits.

Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Both men are marked by deep insecurity about their physical appearances. A doctor’s forceps mangled Wilhelm’s left arm as his mother, Crown Princess Victoria, gave birth to him in 1859. His arm remained withered despite various medical “treatments,” including the new wonder cure, electricity, which caused great pain in the little boy. The adult Wilhelm took great pains to conceal his arm’s deformity, resting his left hand, for example, on the pommel of his sword in formal photographs.

If Wilhelm suffered trauma at birth, Trump’s came in middle age. He lost his hair. Trump is absolutely truthful:  that is his own hair. What he’s concealing, as elaborately as Wilhelm hid his arm, is the amount of hairspray it takes to present that hair for public consumption. He relies on the skill of his stylist, who must have as much training in combing over as a sushi chef has in preparing fugu, that potentially lethal delicacy. [Kaiser Wilhelm kept a barber, meanwhile, whose sole function was to ensure that the Imperial mustache always had the correct amount of parade-ground precision and upturn at its tips.]

Trump’s vanity, in one way, makes him even more vulnerable than his counterpart: were the world to see him before his every-morning transformation, just before he hits the tanning booth, with an orange bald pate framed by oddly-spaced golden tresses that cover his face and fall to his shoulders, then the world, in its wisdom, would laugh him off the stage. The world has little patience for vanity as delusional as Trump’s, and that might be his undoing. Not even Americans would vote for Gollum to be our president. I think.

gollum

Both men learned to be bullies. Trump was as a child, while Wilhelm bullied as an adult and emperor, when Victoria said of him, when he was forty, that “what Willy needs is a good spanking.” Trump’s parents interceded when he was a boy and sent him to a military school to get straightened out. Wilhelm entered the German army when he was in his late teens. For both men, a military  environment was their deliverance. Trump loved military school, loved following orders, loved the comfort of authoritarian structure. [He came closest to breaking the rules with his hair, which was just long enough to be fashionable but short enough to forestall demerits.]

For Wilhelm, the army provided him with a family, and one he needed badly, since his own seems to have been ashamed of him and his deformity. As Emperor, his unbounded love for the military extended to the Kaiserian wardrobe, home to over 200 uniforms to suit Wilhelm’s every mood: he could be an Admiral of the Grand Fleet of a Tuesday, a Colonel of Hussars of a Friday.

Another similarity between the two would be their illusion of infallibility. Trump will never admit to making a mistake. Wilhelm insisted that his side always win in war games. Anything or anyone who threatened the Emperor’s carefully-constructed view of himself had to be eliminated: if Trump’s catch phrase, from his television show, was “You’re fired!” then that’s exactly what Wilhelm did with such alacrity when he cashiered the grand old man, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s unifier, early in his reign.

The problem with infallibility is that it tends to generate a Manichean world-view: the Kaiser’s Germany was outflanked by enemies, both by his English and his Russian cousins, who had to be destroyed, and Trump classifies anyone who doesn’t agree with him as a “loser,” an enemy who must be humiliated with every vulgar weapon in his arsenal. Americans seem to love it; you see the same joy in Trump’s followers that you do in bourgeois Germans celebrating in the streets when war comes in 1914. [In Munich, you can see the future fuhrer’s face–he’s as bourgeois as they come–in the crowd. He is jubilant.]

All bullies are at heart cowards–it’s ironic that Trump’s cowardice was revealed when he ridiculed another man’s physical handicap. When the Great War began in August 1914, Wilhelm timorously asked his general staff if the mobilization couldn’t be stopped. It was too late: the troop trains had left because the military machinery Wilhelm so admired had been so well-oiled by him. At war’s end, he would go into exile in Holland; in one newsreel, he’s still in uniform with ostrich plumes and epaulets and gold braid, and there’s still a sword buckled to his left side, but he’s accompanied by an adorable little dog whose presence renders him ridiculous: the Emperor of Germany had a fondness for dachshunds.

Wilhelm’s narcissism humiliated Germany in 1918 and contributed to its destruction in 1945. Hopefully, it will not take armed conflict to reveal what a buffoon Donald Trump truly is. Let him be caught, without his handlers and his hairspray, out in a good rain, followed by a better wind, and the hair which his stylist grooms with such single-minded dedication will finally betray him. Would this be shallow of us, to judge him by his hair? Of course it would be, and that is all this shallow man deserves.

Power struggle in the fields

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in American History, California history, History, The Great Depression

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Monterey County Sheriff, right, 1936, and deputies.

This photo reminded me immediately of Rod Steiger’s superbly-acted redneck sheriff in the film In the Heat of the Night. But these are Californians, not Mississippians, and these men, according to the scholarship I’ve been trying to digest so far, were representative of an alliance of reactionary forces that dominated California between 1933 and 1938. Whether they were representative of San Luis Obispo County remains to be seen.

What made up that coalition? To borrow Renault’s quote from Casablanca, they were the usual suspects: Harry Chandler’s L.A. Times, the Hearst newspapers, the L.A. District Attorney and the LAPD, the Chamber of Commerce, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and Associated Farmers, a powerful anti-labor lobby (they blocked literally hundreds of bills in the state legislature that would have provided laborers with a minimum wage, with decent housing, even a bill that would have required employers to provide drinking cups) that also organized resistance to and suppression of strikes. They had professionals whose specialty was busting strikes. They wore revolvers on their hips, like Henry Sanborn, a national guard officer who organized hundreds of paramilitary “deputies” in the 1936 Salinas lettuce strike, a strike provoked by the growers themselves when they locked workers out of the packing sheds. The growers, in fact, had already built a big stockade, complete with concertina wire, in anticipation of a strike. “Don’t worry,” they told alarmed packing-shed workers before the lockout. “That’s for the Filipinos.”

By the way, the one dissident in the state’s economic power structure, an ardent New Dealer, was A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy, by now the Bank of America.

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Another disturbing trend was the extent to which this coalition depended on the newly-founded California Highway Patrol. In Salinas and other places, including in a brief mention in an article about Nipomo, the CHP constituted a kind of rapid-repsonse strike suppression force and one, unlike the “deputies” and their baseball bats in Salinas, that was heavily armed.

In the history of American labor disputes, like the 1894 Pullman Strike, this traditionally had been the role of government: to uphold capital and to suppress labor. TR’s intervention in the 1902 Pennsylvania Coal Strike represented a rare departure, because he demanded that both sides come to the bargaining table or he’d use the army to take over the mines. Neither management nor labor were pleased with the president, but the strike was settled. When TR’s cousin became president, capitalists, including California growers, were outraged that the government seemed to side so clearly with workers, what with the Wagner Act (which did not extend to agricultural workers; FDR didn’t want to alienate Southern Democrats and their planter-supporters), with health inspections of labor camps, and with occasional attempts by the federal government to settle strikes (one such attempt had a Labor Department official beaten, stripped, and left in the desert of the Imperial Valley).  The Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder at this time regularly railed against the excesses of this activist government on its editorial page while its news page primly reported another schedule of AAA subsidy payments.

Frustrated as they were with FDR, growers and their allies obviously took on the strikers, not the federal government.The easiest way to sanction strikers, and to make labor organizers “disappear” (Temporarily. Usually.) was to arrest them for vagrancy, since they clearly weren’t working. That was the pretext used by SLO County Sheriff Haskins, backed by 200 instant deputy sheriffs, in the 1937 pea strike, in April. It worked; that strike, centered in Nipomo, ended pretty quickly. So had another one farther north, in January, in and around Pismo Beach, organized by Filipino laborers against Japanese growers. It was over in thee weeks, with some violence–fights between strikers and scabs–and it ended with a negotiated settlement. The growers didn’t negotiate with the strikers, by the way. They negotiated with the Chamber of Commerce, which dictated the settlement. Curious.

California Filipinos were militant and angry–the late-breaking little story below is from 1934–and probably for good reason. Several sources I’ve read place them at the bottom of a kind of racist continuum with whites at the highest level, followed by Japanese, then Mexicans, and finally Filipinos, who were housed in filthy camps, frequently harassed by police, and seen as sexual predators, with their invariable target, of course, white womanhood.This, too, sounds like 1930s Mississippi as much as 1930s California.

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There was racial tension, as well, between Japanese growers, who had a generational head start, and their Filipino workers. Japanese growers in the Los Angeles area did not have a good reputation for treating their workers well, but LA was, again, a focal point for anti-labor resistance. I’m suspending judgment on local Japanese growers–my friends are from some of those families–until I can learn more. I’ve found no connection so far with between them and Associated Farmers, and, unlike the growers in the Salinas Valley or the San Joaquin Valley, these were small-scale farmers: the Ikeda family, for example, farmed no more than 100 acres, and much of that land was leased. The problem with that analysis is that these growers worked in concert, in what is today POVE, so potentially they might have represented thousands of acres of peas under cultivation. But it’s the Herald-Recorder that really comes off badly–this was before editor Newell Strother’s time–its editorial columns are firmly on the side represented by Associated Farmers, and its news columns, especially in their treatment of Filipinos, are openly racist.

One 1937 story details an Oceano raid on a hall holding taxi dances–Filipino men would buy a ticket and dance with a female, invariably Caucasian, since Filipinas were not allowed to immigrate. The raiders were sheriff’s deputies, including the baseball-bat variety seen in the Salinas lettuce strike. Several, including the girls, were arrested, and the Herald-Recorder reported that one Filipino laborer had bought more than 200 dance tickets from one of the arrested taxi dancers.

I guess this detail in the story was meant to provoke a sharp intake of breath on the part of its white readers. The taxi dancers were white, their patrons weren’t, and the miscegenation laws were still on the books in California.

Tensions began to ease by 1938, partly because the economy was beginning to recover, partly because a reactionary governor, Frank Merriam, was replaced by a more moderate one, Cuthbert Olsen, but also because both state investigations (one young attorney-investigator was Clark Kerr, the future UC President) and a federal one, led by Progressive Sen. Robert LaFollette, embarrassed Associated Farmers with their own conduct: they’d denied their workers basic civil rights, including due process, relied on violence, were indifferent toward inadequate and unhealthy housing conditions, used industrial espionage on a large scale, and frequently cut wages, continuing to claim that they could only pay what the market would bear when, after their 1933 low point, crop prices had begun to recover and would rise steadily into the war years.

If it sounds like I’m taking sides, I’d agree cheerfully. Objectivity demands that historians sometimes take sides, because historians must make informed judgments based on empirical evidence. History does not judge this alliance of big business, big agriculture and state police power well. The powerful brought that judgment, in their seeming victory over the strikes of the mid-1930s, on themselves.